1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to digital information storage, and more particularly, to a computer system and method for accessing a protected partition of a disk drive.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Traditionally, a disk drive provides a nonvolatile disk media for storage of data under the exclusive control of a host computer""s operating system. Generally, a user installs an application program on the disk drive from a portable media such as floppy disk and/or compact-disk read-only-memory (CDROM), or from another computer over a network. Thus, the user participates in the installation of the application program. Such installation activity fails to take advantage of the capacity and the capability of current disk drives.
A host computer generally includes a basic input output system (BIOS) that provides routines for performing fundamental tasks such as accessing a disk drive. However, the storage capacity of current disk drives may exceed an address range of a host computer""s BIOS further impeding efforts to take advantage of the capacity and capability of current disk drives.
Accordingly, there exists a need for overcoming a host computer""s BIOS limits that may impede advantageous use of the capacity and capability of current disk drives. The present invention satisfies these needs.
The present invention may be embodied in a method and a related computer system. The computer system includes a disk drive and a host computer with a native drive-access routine having an address range. The disk drive includes a user area having data sectors that are accessible to a user""s preferred operating system and a protected area having data sectors that are inaccessible to the user""s preferred operating system. The method provides access to data sectors of the protected area having addresses that lie beyond the address range of the native drive-access routine. The method includes receiving a command in the disk drive for reading a master boot record for the user""s preferred operating system to initiate a bootload of the user""s preferred operating system, and detecting the command in the disk drive. In response to detecting the command, transferring a drive-selected master boot record that, when executed in the computer system, initiates a process that enables address spoofing in the disk drive, loads an extended-address disk-access routine from the protected area using spoofed addresses associated with data sectors that lie within the address range of the native drive-access routine, and executes the extended-address disk-access routine to replace the native drive-access routine for providing access to data sectors having addresses that lie within the protected area.
Further, the process initiated by the drive-selected master boot record may disable address spoofing after the extended-address disk-access routine is loaded from the protected area. The disk drive may perform address spoofing by accessing data from a predetermined spoof data sector having an address that lies within the protected area in response to a host computer request for data from a target data sector having an address that lies within the address range of the native drive-access routine. The extended-address disk-access routine may have an address range that includes addresses for data sectors that lie within the protected area. The native disk-access routine may be an interrupt routine of a basic input output system (BIOS) of the host computer.